Sebastian Anthony

Sebastian was ExtremeTech's senior editor from 2011 through the end of 2014. He wrote about everything from brain implants to the latest computer chips, from society's servitude to electricity to the impending arrival of the technological singularity.

For almost the entirety of Firefox’s 12-year history, Mozilla — and thus Firefox — has been primarily funded by a lucrative deal with Google. Since 2004, Google has been paying Mozilla around $100 million per year — or about 85% of Mozilla’s total income — to keep Google as the default search provider. Today, that finally changes: Google is out and Yahoo is in.

Clearly, we still have a lot more to learn about the universe: The Large Hadron Collider, famed for its discovery of the Higgs boson, has discovered two new subatomic particles. Known as Xi_b’- and Xi_b*-, the two particles had previously been predicted to exist by the formidable hypothesizing powers of particle physicists, and now they have been observed and confirmed by CERN’s LHCb team.

Starting in 2015, everyone will be able to get their hands on a free, officially sanctioned SSL/TLS certificate so that HTTPS can finally be enabled everywhere. The new service — a certificate authority (CA) called Let’s Encrypt — is led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai joining as major launch partners. If you don’t know much about SSL, TLS, and HTTPS, trust me when I say that this is a very big deal.

According to Earth’s dedicated team of satellite observers, Russia is developing a satellite that can chase down other satellites. Obviously, such an ability could be used for the forces of good, such as repairing or refueling other spacecraft — but the rest of the world is worried that Russia might be looking to blow up other satellites, or to get close enough that it can take photos of classified designs or eavesdrop on communications.

Intel will combine its PC and mobile chip divisions, according to an email sent to employees by CEO Brian Krzanich. There’s no word on how this might affect Intel’s future PC and mobile products, but presumably this might be the end of either the Atom or Core line of chips — which, to be honest, is probably a sensible move given how the latest Atom and ultra-mobile Core chips are fairly close in terms of performance and power consumption.

What looks like Apple’s iPad Mini, but has better specs, is considerably cheaper, and runs a stock version of Android 5.0 Lollipop? The new Nokia N1 tablet, apparently. At just $250 with 32GB of storage — as opposed to the iPad Mini 3’s base price of $400 for the 16GB model — the Nokia N1 is definitely priced to sell.

Microsoft, making good on its promise to regularly push out new versions of Windows 10 Technical Preview, has released build 9879 — and there’s a surprising number of changes under the hood. Most notably, Windows 10 is now starting to look like a new (or at least different) operating system — but there’s also some nice tweaks, such as the ability to remove the new Search and Task View buttons from the taskbar, and an early look at the new ‘Continuum’ Start menu.

The European Space Agency has released an amazing set of images that show Philae bouncing across the surface of comet 67P. During its initial descent, Rosetta’s Philae lander failed to fire its landing harpoons — and thus proceeded to rebound off the hard comet, travelling hundreds of meters into the air before coming back down for a second landing about two hours later. We still don’t know where Philae finally landed, but the photos released by the ESA are rather extraordinary.

Microsoft has become one of the first companies to deploy autonomous robot security guards. Dubbed the K5, this roughly human-sized 300-pound (136 kg) robot is equipped with enough cameras, sensors, and alarms that it can replace most human security patrols — but fortunately, despite looking like a Dalek from the Doctor Who universe, it is not equipped with a ray gun or any other method for harming or detaining humans.

Sadly, even space agencies with budgets of tens of billions of dollars are not immune to the pathetically lacking longevity of batteries. The Philae lander has landed in an awkward position where its solar panels can’t see the Sun, and thus its battery reserves are quickly running down. The European Space Agency will now try a series of heroic measures to try and keep Philae alive, but there’s the regretful possibility that Friday night — tonight — will be the last time we hear from the probe.